Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity
release_tvz2t42dm5hxvb2u5okgbjtehq
by
Anthony Foy
Abstract
After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity
In application/xml+jats
format
Archived Files and Locations
application/pdf 297.4 kB
file_stk2lcbmkzapzkje3szxvixcya
|
periodicos.ufsc.br (web) web.archive.org (webarchive) |
article-journal
Stage
published
Date 2021-06-07
Open Access Publication
In DOAJ
In ISSN ROAD
In Keepers Registry
ISSN-L:
0101-4846
access all versions, variants, and formats of this works (eg, pre-prints)
Crossref Metadata (via API)
Worldcat
SHERPA/RoMEO (journal policies)
wikidata.org
CORE.ac.uk
Semantic Scholar
Google Scholar